Sept. 24, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:36
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is what you're fighting for. | ||
| I mean, every day you're out there. | ||
| What they're doing is blowing people off. | ||
| If you continue to look the other way and shut up, then the oppressors, the authoritarians, get total control and total power. | ||
| Because this is just like in Arizona. | ||
| This is just like in Georgia. | ||
| It's another element that backs them into a corner and shows their lies and misrepresentations. | ||
| This is why this audience is going to have to get engaged. | ||
| As we've told you, this is the fight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | |
| War Room Battleground. | ||
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| It is Monday, September 23rd in the year of our Lord 2024. | ||
| I am Mike Davis, the viceroy, standing in again for Stephen K. Bannon, who Biden and Kamala have in the clink. | ||
| We have a great show today. | ||
| We have Adam Wren. | ||
| The national political reporter for Politico who wrote a profile on me that published on Friday, so we'll talk to him about that. | ||
| I call him the the viceroy's biographer. | ||
| And then we also have Andrew Ferguson from the Federal Trade Commission, my friend and former colleague from the Senate Judiciary Committee, one of the key warriors who helps President Trump transform the federal judiciary. | ||
| And then we have Jeffrey Clark, my friend, and hopefully a senior official | ||
| on the Trump 47 Justice Department. | ||
| But we'll start right off the bat with Adam Renn. | ||
| Adam, welcome to the War Room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good to be with you, Mike. | |
| Yeah, so let's talk about this. | ||
| You did this profile on me on Friday and it has, frankly, it has a lot of the conservatives cheering and a lot of the liberals scowling. | ||
| So talk about why you decided to write this profile and how this came out to be. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, so Mike, as you know, I was fascinated dating back to last December after having watched your much publicized hit on Benny Johnson's podcast About how someone who organized the University of Iowa and then other colleges across Iowa for George W. Bush, how someone goes from doing that, a president who championed immigration reform. | |
| to someone who talks about putting kids in cages. | ||
| I was curious whether this was real or not, whether it was part of a troll or an act, as you've said before. | ||
| You've been mentioned, obviously, as a potential attorney general for Donald Trump in a second term. | ||
| Obviously, you've said that you're unconfirmable, that you'd need 100 So I was just fascinated by the character that you presented and what that meant for a possible second Trump term. | ||
| So we've been talking, you know, off the record a lot. | ||
| Caught up with you in Manhattan earlier this year and then in front of the Supreme Court where you almost punched a guy's lights out, a protester, and then we had lunch after and then followed you to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and was sort of fascinated by the character you cut. | ||
| I mean, Donald Trump himself talks about you as being highly respected, he said out front of his Manhattan trial one day. | ||
| And so I'm just curious, you know, I was just curious of how you saw a potential second term. | ||
| And I think you're right. | ||
| The reaction to this piece has been pretty polarized. | ||
| Liberals have screamed in horror at the possibility that you represent, and conservatives have have largely cheered it. | ||
| A few people have told me it was a hit job. | ||
| But yeah, I'm happy to be talking with you today. | ||
| Happy that you're still talking with me. | ||
| I would say this, Adam. | ||
| I mean, obviously, I think you're a fair reporter. | ||
| You reported good things, and you reported bad things, and you reported them accurately and in context. | ||
| And that's what a reporter is supposed to do. | ||
| And I respect real reporters. | ||
| I respect real journalists, even if they say bad things about me. | ||
| Frankly, I like it when mainstream reporters say bad things about me because it helps the Article 3 Project raise a lot of money at article3project.org. | ||
| So that doesn't bother me one bit. | ||
| What was your takeaway after talking with me over the last six months? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, first, I'm curious what fundraising has been like since this story has come out, whether you've seen a bump or not. | |
| But I think my takeaway is that, in some ways, you are still the same Mike Davis that you were in 2016, 2014, 2015. | ||
| Of all the institutions in the federal government, you still believe most in the Supreme Court and ultimately want to use the Supreme Court to dismantle parts of the federal government. | ||
| And really, in some ways, that's a traditional conservative idea. | ||
| Less government, rein in the power of the federal government. | ||
| And I'm not entirely sure that MAGA World Thanks. | ||
| And that kind of way. | ||
| I mean, I know there's this talk of draining the swamp, but I'm not sure that they think in sort of that traditional small C conservative way of returning, you know, power from the federal government to, to the people. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a good point. | ||
| I would say this. | ||
| It's hard to be a dictator if you have your judges dismantle the executive branch. | ||
| So it kind of goes against this notion that Trump's going to be a dictator if he's appointing Supreme Court justices and lower federal court judges who want to dismantle a lot of the executive branch and return it to what our founders intended. | ||
| So that's one thing. So what you talked about, for example, let's talk about a couple things. | ||
| The journalists were freaking out because I talked about putting journalists in the gulag during my three-week reign of terror as Trump's acting Attorney General, which is not even legally possible under the Vacancy Act, and so that I pivoted to be the viceroy. | ||
| And the whole point of that troll is for these Uh, these reporters, these Democrat politicians, these Democrat operatives to understand and appreciate that a politicized and weaponized justice system in an intel agencies is very bad for our country. | ||
| And it seems like after two years of running this lawfare against President Trump, they didn't quite get it. | ||
| And so until I started pretending like we're going to put journalists in gulags, and then all of a sudden, a lot of journalists began to get it. | ||
| What's your take on that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I mean, I came away from the process of profiling you or writing your biography of realizing that, you know, traditionally, you think reporters are an important part of the process of democracy. | |
| Even if in some cases, as you joked that day in front of the Supreme Court about the protester, that he was an MSNBC Supreme Court analyst who'd escaped the asylum. | ||
| I came away thinking that you respect journalists. | ||
| You know, broadly, but I wonder, too, if if the MAGA, you know, movement is in on the joke and whether whether that they truly get it's a joke in the same way that you know it is. | ||
| And I do see, you know, the point that you are making about the dangers of politicizing the justice. | ||
| I guess I do wonder, looking at a potential Trump second term, is if that's something that could happen. | ||
| Whether you think if Trump wins in November that he should use the Department of Justice to go after his enemies. | ||
| That's still not entirely clear in my mind as I think about this. | ||
| I think you'd think that's a bad outcome, but I think that there's still this question mark of, is that something that Trump Well, I would say this. | ||
| Nobody's above the law, as the Democrats always say to Trump and his top aides and his lawyers and his supporters. | ||
| And also, you have to understand that if you're bringing grand jury indictments, you have to have oftentimes a D.C. | ||
| grand jury indict, and you'd have to have a D.C. | ||
| judge. | ||
| play along with whatever trial that or whatever persecution like the Democrats have done to Trump and his top aides and | ||
| his allies and his supporters. I just don't think it's | ||
| realistic that any Republican president would be able to politicize | ||
| and weaponize our Justice Department against his political | ||
| enemies for non crimes like Biden and Kamala Harris and these | ||
| Democrat prosecutors in New York, Atlanta, even in Arizona have done to Republicans. | ||
| I just don't think it's, I don't think it's feasible. | ||
| And I don't think it's a good thing that you politicize and weaponize the justice system against your political enemies. | ||
| But apparently, the Democrats have lost that memo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, coming on today was sort of the least I could do for all the time that you've given me, but primarily I'm doing this interview so that if Trump does win in November, you might consider me and give me prime space in the Gulag, wherever that will be. | ||
| I'm basically here to negotiate a good spot for me and my family so that we can not be in the worst part of the Gulag. | ||
| I would, Adam, I think you're a good reporter. | ||
| So I'll put you in the VIP gulag in Indiana, so you don't even have to come to DC. | ||
| So you'll have a special place for you. | ||
| For reporters who report fairly, you get your preference for the gulag. | ||
| But anyway, Adam, where does the War Room posse find you online? | ||
| What are your coordinates? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, you can find me at politico.com, search Adam Renn, or you can find me on X at Adam Renn, A-D-A-M-W-R-E-N, like the bird. | |
| Thank you very much, Adam Renn, for coming on. | ||
| Next we're going to go, speaking of President Trump's second term, we have two all-star guests. | ||
| We have Andrew Ferguson, who's at the Federal Trade Commission, and then we have Jeff Clark up after that. | ||
| We're going to talk for roughly 15 minutes with Andrew Ferguson, and then we'll spend the rest of the hour with Jeffrey Clark. | ||
| So let's bring in Andrew Ferguson. | ||
| He probably regrets Coming to the war room already. | ||
| Andrew and I are friends and former colleagues. | ||
| When I did my stub clerkship on the Supreme Court back when Gorsuch got confirmed, Andrew Ferguson was clerking for Justice Clarence Thomas, by far my favorite justice. | ||
| Don't tell Gorsuch. | ||
| But he so when I clerked for about four months and it was pretty funny Overlapping with Andrew Ferguson because I don't like many of the law clerks I don't think they knew what to do with Mike Davis, but I think I think he's grown to like me a bit but Andrew thank you for coming on you you also came and joined me on the Senate Judiciary Committee to confirm and Justice Kavanaugh, Andrew, played a key role on the Senate Judiciary Committee. | ||
| He led the special counsel team, worked around the clock, and then he took my job on the Senate Judiciary Committee running nominations when I got chased out of the Senate after breaking every piece of China in the Senate. | ||
| Andrew worked for the Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and You know, people, and then he went on to work for Mitch McConnell in the leader's office. | ||
| And I would say this, I know that the war room has a lot of issues with Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham, but I'll tell you what, they were rock stars on judges. | ||
| Really, really solid on judges. | ||
| That's why I have respect for them. | ||
| I disagree with them on many issues. | ||
| But I have a lot of respect for them on judges and Andrew played the key role in finishing the transformation of the federal judiciary with his flawless confirmation of justice. | ||
| Amy Coney Barrett and then he he went off and he was the solicitor general for the state of Virginia. | ||
| And did a really good job there. | ||
| He was the tip of the spear on the fight against Google. | ||
| He was the architect of one of the lawsuits against Google with the Biden Justice Department. | ||
| The Biden Justice Department has gotten everything wrong except for Big Tech, and they have done a very good job in the antitrust division of the Biden Justice Department. | ||
| And then Andrew is now on the Federal Trade Commission as one of the Republican-appointed Welcome to the War Room, Adam. | ||
| Not Adam, she's just Andrew. | ||
| I just talked to Adam. | ||
| Andrew, we will not chase you out of here with your Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell credentials, but let's get your thoughts. | ||
| We talked about Clarence Thomas. | ||
| And Clarence Thomas is your former boss. | ||
| I love Clarence Thomas. | ||
| I love Jenny Thomas. | ||
| There have been unrelenting attacks on Clarence Thomas, along with the rest of the Supreme Court, over the last 40 years. | ||
| Since Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, since he's gone on the Supreme Court, give me your thoughts, your reaction to these attacks on Clarence Thomas and the judiciary more broadly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mike, thanks for having me on The War Room. | |
| I'm stoked to be here. | ||
| It's good to see you again. | ||
| I love that Adam Rehn piece. | ||
| You should be very happy that people are saying that sort of thing about you. | ||
| And just to be clear, I'm here in my individual capacity. | ||
| I'm not representing the Commission. | ||
| So, I clerk for Justice Thomas. | ||
| I think he's the greatest living American. | ||
| I think he's the greatest justice who ever served. | ||
| And I think that there is no doubt that these attacks that are false, Columnius are aimed to try to get him to bend, to try to | ||
| break. | ||
| He's been on the court for more than 30 years. | ||
| He's within sniffing distance of being the longest serving justice in American history. | ||
| And he has been a thorn in progressive sides since he got confirmed. | ||
| And they have chosen this, you know, late in his career as a way to try to get him to | ||
| bend or break, to get off the court, to change his mind. | ||
| They've gone after him. | ||
| They've gone after his wife, Jenny, who's a great American. | ||
| They've gone after his friends. | ||
| They've gone after clerks. | ||
| They've picked the worst possible target to try to do this on because of all of the justices | ||
| on the court and have ever served, he is the one who will never break. | ||
| He is unflappable. | ||
| He is indefatigable. | ||
| He's never, ever going to break. | ||
| So they can say whatever they want about him. | ||
| His integrity is unimpeachable. | ||
| His commitment to the rule of law and to the Constitution, unflappable. | ||
| None of this is going to work. | ||
| He will outlast anything that they throw at him. | ||
| They've been throwing it at him since they tried to Derail his confirmation in 1992. | ||
| It didn't work then. | ||
| It's not going to work now. | ||
| They're never going to knock him off that perch. | ||
| He's going to be the greatest justice in American history until he decides he's ready to leave. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Remember for the War Room Posse, Clarence Thomas grew up dirt poor in the segregated South, right? | ||
| And he was actually a liberal in his youth. | ||
| And then he saw the light and he became a conservative because I think he understood Like I saw with my parents working in these poor inner city schools growing up that these government programs that are supposed to help poor people, particularly poor black people, trap these people in intergenerational poverty with fatherless homes, | ||
| Crime-ridden neighborhoods and failed government schools, and that is the perfect recipe for the Marxist to trap people in poverty. | ||
| And I think Clarence Thomas understands that. | ||
| He's been, he was a Marxist. | ||
| He spoke, he's been speaking out against this for 40 years, and that's why the left hates him. | ||
| They hate the fact that a black man is a conservative. | ||
| They hate the fact that a conservative black man is on the Supreme Court, and they've done everything they can to destroy him and I really appreciate that you're speaking out because a lot of these former clerks can't speak out for some reason. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I defy you to read his concurrence in Students for Fair Admission, the big affirmative action case where the court just struck down affirmative action that he's been calling on the court to do his entire career. | |
| I defy you to read his concurrence and not be moved to tears. | ||
| It's unbelievable the witness he bears to what affirmative action does and how unfair it is and how it harms both, | ||
| people of all races, people who are denied access to higher education institutions because of their race, | ||
| people who others believe got it because of their race, read his concurrence, it's unbelievably moving. | ||
| It's a great, great sort of pay on to American equality under law. | ||
| And it's just phenomenal. | ||
| What are some of your other favorite opinions from Clarence Thomas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That one is my favorite opinion. | |
| I mean, I was SG when it happened. | ||
| Virginia was an amicus on the side that Justice Thomas took in that case, and it came down, and it was, I believe, the first time that Justice Thomas had joined a majority opinion on affirmative action in full. | ||
| He generally would join parts of it, but wanted to go further than the court was willing to go to get rid of affirmative action. | ||
| He joined it in full, and I saw the judgment, and I said, we won. | ||
| If he's here, we won. | ||
| And then I read his opinion and the final two paragraphs of his opinion, and I moved to tears. | ||
| It's unbelievably moving. | ||
| And he read from his opinion at the court when they announced the opinion, and that recording is online. | ||
| Just deeply, deeply moving. | ||
| And it's also, you know, he has been fighting this fight sometimes basically alone his entire career, slandered for fighting this fight as a black American, for trying to resist the sort of deeply divisive nature of affirmative action, has suffered unbelievably for taking the stand, and finally prevailed just by outlasting it. | ||
| And, you know, it's just the perfect example of if they think they're gonna knock him off with these attacks, Give me a break. | ||
| He's been through way worse and is still standing. | ||
| What kind of judges do you think President Trump should appoint in his second term? | ||
| Trump's biggest and most consequential accomplishment of his first term was the transformation of the Supreme Court from the left of center court to the Clarence Thomas court. | ||
| And then transforming a majority of these critically important federal courts of appeals around the country, the last stop for more than 99% of federal appeals. | ||
| So what should President Trump do in a second term? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What types of judges should he appoint? | |
| That's a good question. | ||
| I think the main thing to bear in mind is the thing that the justices and the judges that President Trump will appoint need most of all is backbone. | ||
| So we figured out, President Trump, with assistance from my former boss, Leader McConnell, who was an absolute warrior on judges for four years, your and my former boss, Chuck Grassley, who was a warrior beginning with the Merrick Garland fight, even when he was in cycle, just a true act of political courage, and Lindsey Graham, We maxed out prestige. | ||
| We broke records for the number of Supreme Court clerks that we put on the bench. | ||
| Even liberal critics admitted that these were the best credentialed Court of Appeals judges in American history. | ||
| The thing we need to focus on now is backbone, because we have watched, especially over the last 12 months, Progressives just attack the judiciaries and institution, and the reason that they're attacking the judiciaries and institution is that the outcomes aren't what they want, and they are trying to manipulate the outcomes by attacking the institution. | ||
| We're conservatives. | ||
| We are the institution defenders. | ||
| It's super important that we do that. | ||
| The fact that some conservatives at one point favored term limits doesn't mean we need to favor term limits when they're being held as a gun to the head of the judiciary around the same time of an election. | ||
| But in light of what we know the left will do to President Trump's appointed judges, we need people with backbone. | ||
| We need people who are willing to say, the law is the law, right is right, and I do not care what the New York Times is going to say about me. | ||
| And I think that's particularly true for the Supreme Court. | ||
| You've seen it. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| We both clerked. | ||
| We both worked in this space. | ||
| The barrage to which nominees and Supreme Court justices are subjected by the mainstream press and their progressive allies is unbelievable. | ||
| It's hard to imagine. | ||
| And unless we are selecting very carefully for people who are not just going to be good originals, we've got so many of those on the lower courts now, but who are willing to stand up and say, I do not care what you think about me. | ||
| The law is the law. | ||
| Right is right. | ||
| Here is the answer. | ||
| And I'm going home. | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| Without giving an exhaustive list of potential Supreme Court nominees, who do you think would be good? | ||
| Who is on the bench right now or elsewhere who would be good on the Supreme Court in Trump's second term? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Because of President Trump and Leader McConnell, we have this like embarrassment of riches. | |
| The list is, we have too many is the problem. | ||
| But I mean, there are so many good ones like Judge Thapar on the 6th Circuit, Judge Ho and Judge Oldham in the 5th Circuit, Judge Mady on the 3rd Circuit, Judge Branch, Judge Legault on the 11th, and that's just like a fraction of the list. | ||
| There are so many good options. | ||
| Judge Katsas on the D.C. | ||
| Circuit, who's an absolute warrior. | ||
| There are so many good options. | ||
| I don't envy President Trump If he wins the election, having to pick from among this list, because normally the way it is is a couple people sort of emerge from previous administrations as like the cream of the crop. | ||
| There are just so many hardcore, constitutionally committed judges who also have demonstrated backbone. | ||
| They've stood the line on race issues, on religious liberty issues, on free speech issues. | ||
| And that's the sort of test that President Trump will need to adopt is, yeah, are they good in the law, but are they going to stand up when the storm hits? | ||
| Let's talk about antitrust because you're kind of the unsung hero right now of the antitrust fight when you were the SG. | ||
| of Virginia, you brought a major lawsuit against Google with many other states along with the Biden Justice Department. | ||
| Talk about your views on big tech and talk about what you've done on big tech. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the Google case was weird, right? | |
| Because Attorney General Mears in Virginia, very conservative. | ||
| Attorney General Garland, Very, very liberal. | ||
| But there is an emerging bipartisan consensus that something is wrong in our markets with big tech. | ||
| And the issue that we worked on with the Justice Department was, whenever you go online and a website pops in front of you, we've all seen it. | ||
| There are banners on the sides and on the tops, and they're full of advertisements. | ||
| Google basically controls all of the mechanisms that decide what ads you're going to see and how much they cost. | ||
| And they did it by buying up a couple nascent competitors early on, and then they would tell people, you can't use our ad tech technology unless you use our other ad technology, even though it's not as good as some of our competitors. | ||
| It's called tying. | ||
| And Google developed this monopoly on both sides of the advertising market. | ||
| Both advertisers and publishers all have to go through Google. | ||
| And, you know, this theory had been floating around for a long time. | ||
| President Trump brought the original search suit against Google that the Department of Justice just won. | ||
| Huge, huge credit should go to President Trump for doing that. | ||
| Very unusual for Republicans to be very aggressive on antitrust. | ||
| And President Trump saw this very early. | ||
| Um, and then the Biden administration followed it up with this ad tech suit, um, and they wanted state partners and, you know, can be hard to do state partners, um, from the other party. | ||
| Um, but Attorney General Meares saw, like, this is a problem for consumers. | ||
| It's a problem for all Americans. | ||
| It's driving up prices, brought the suit. | ||
| We brought it in the Eastern District of Virginia and they're in trial right now. | ||
| I mean, we only, we brought it fewer than two years ago and they're already going to trial. | ||
| They're in the middle of trial right now. | ||
| If this trial goes out well, and I'm pretty optimistic it's gone really well so far, it could require Google to break up its ad tech monopoly, to spin off parts of the ad tech monopoly. | ||
| Huge benefits for consumers. | ||
| And that is, just so the war room posse understands, it is Google's online advertising monopoly that provides Google the lifeblood it uses to censor, silence, deplatform, and cancel conservatives and others with whom They disagree. | ||
| So breaking up Google's online advertising monopoly is truly the silver bullet to breaking up big tech. | ||
| We are closing out here, Andrew. | ||
| Any final thoughts you may have? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm happy you're here, man. | |
| It's really fun to do this with you. | ||
| It's good to see you again. | ||
| We'll do it more often. | ||
| We'll do it more often. | ||
| Thank you to Andrew Ferguson. | ||
| We're coming up on a break here. | ||
| How do people even get a hold of you? | ||
| Are you online? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am. | |
| I've got my official account as AFergusonFTC on X. And, you know, FTC has a giant website. | ||
| Our stuff's all there. | ||
| If you've got consumer complaints, that's the place to go. | ||
| Well, thank you, Andrew Ferguson from the Federal Trade Commission. | ||
| Commissioner, you big dog for coming into the war room. | ||
| And next up, we're going to bring in Jeff Clark to talk for the rest of the hour about what he's up to and what the Trump 47 Justice Department should look like and what it should do to fix this mess. | ||
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|
unidentified
|
All this nonsense, all this spin, they can't handle the truth. | |
| War Room Battleground with Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Welcome back to the War Room. | ||
| I'm Mike Davis, the Viceroy, standing in for Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| We have in the War Room today one of my favorite people in Washington, definitely my favorite lawyer, Jeffrey Clark. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Jeffrey Clark, as we all know, was a former top Justice Department official for President Trump. | ||
| He worked at one of the top law firms in the world. | ||
| Serious lawyer with serious credentials. | ||
| And the Democrats put Jeff Clark through the ringer. | ||
| And we're going to talk about that. | ||
| And we're also going to talk about what should happen in a Trump 47 Justice Department to bring justice for this unprecedented lawfare and election interference against President Trump. | ||
| His top aide Stephen Bannon who's in prison right now, Peter Navarro who went to prison, his lawyers like Jeff Clark and John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, and his January 6 supporters who were persecuted, yes persecuted, as the Supreme Court Correctly held in the Fisher decision in June when the Supreme Court held that the Biden-Harris Justice Department illegally contorted, politicized, and weaponized a post-Enron obstruction of justice statute intended for corporate fraud to go after their political enemies. | ||
| And it's inexcusable. | ||
| It's unacceptable. | ||
| Julie Kelly has been one of the leading voices out there on this, and she's the one who raised this issue for me. | ||
| There have to be consequences for what they're doing to these January 6th defendants. | ||
| We have Trump, and Trump's a billionaire. | ||
| He's a billionaire, former and future president. | ||
| It's un-American. | ||
| It's unacceptable what they're doing to him, but he can weather the storm. | ||
| These January 6th defendants cannot. | ||
| We need to be speaking out more against this political persecution. | ||
| Let's talk to Jeff Clark. | ||
| Let's talk about the persecution against you. | ||
| You were a top Justice Department official. | ||
| You were the head of the Environment Division and Assistant Attorney General, Senate-confirmed, and then you were the acting head of the Civil Division, and you wanted to provide... At the same time. | ||
| At the same time. | ||
| You oversaw thousands of people, and you wanted to provide legal advice To the President of the United States, who runs the Justice Department, he's your client, right? | ||
| And so, tell me, what happened to you for providing this legal advice? | ||
| Sure, Mike. | ||
| Well, thanks for having me, and I'm glad to follow Andrew Ferguson here, you know, and good to be with the viceroy-designate for the future Trump administration. | ||
| Look, so, what happened to me is, as you said, I was called on to present legal advice about The 2020 election and what to do about it, especially in the face of the fact that as has come out publicly, although there's still much of the story that's privileged and President Trump has had his lawyers send me two letters, not just one to take executive privilege and a host of other privileges, including some obscure ones that probably not many people know about, like law enforcement privilege. | ||
| That they didn't want to do any real investigations of the election, and I think that's come out since then. | ||
| Instead, former AG Barr was shutting down investigations. | ||
| He shut down an investigation that the U.S. | ||
| attorney Bill McSwain in Philadelphia, the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, wanted to do. | ||
| He shut down an investigation that a U.S. | ||
| attorney in Florida wanted to do that involved Andrew Gillum. | ||
| And told that U.S. | ||
| attorney, Larry Keefe, that if he ever raised his head about trying to investigate those sorts of issues, he would be fired. | ||
| And he also shut down an investigation into the postal worker from New York who said that he was driving ballots to Pennsylvania that was being investigated by the Amistad Project and by Colonel Schaefer. | ||
| So there are probably other investigations that were shut down that were privileged that We didn't even see, but they're just three quick examples. | ||
| So, look, I worked on a letter that was very modest in its design. | ||
| It was basically keying off of the fact that there had been an investigation done by Senator Ligon, a state senator in Georgia, of election irregularities and fraud, and concluded that there was pretty good evidence in those categories, took a lot of sworn testimony and live testimony, And the letter indicated that under the Elector's Clause of the Constitution, the Georgia legislature could call itself into special session to do more investigations of the election. | ||
| So that's it. | ||
| They could do more investigations of the election. | ||
| The Justice Department sends letters to state officials all the time. | ||
| Yet, when the New York Times leaked a private meeting in the Oval Office discussing whether to send that letter and whether to continue me in the spot actually Mike of being the acting attorney general, which is a spot I held for nine hours before there was a resignation pact launched against me by my former colleagues at the Justice Department. | ||
| They didn't want these investigations to take place, and they threw a kind of hissy fit about it. | ||
| And with only 17 days left to go before the inauguration of Joe Biden, they pitched all of this anonymously to the New York Times and in a series of articles by Katie Benner. | ||
| They postured that President Trump and I were engaged in a coup against the United States and the peaceful transition of power, which is about the dumbest idea I can imagine. | ||
| But yet, you know, MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, these stupid ideas get credence. | ||
| So that's the origin story of my time of troubles, Mike. | ||
| Tell us the fallout you've faced as a lawyer and as an American. | ||
| I mean, you have been viciously attacked, viciously smeared, and you've also been legally attacked. | ||
| Let's talk about those. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So, you know, after the anonymously sourced New York Times hit pieces ran, first the House Oversight Committee, under then-Carolyn Maloney, came after me. | ||
| Eventually, they called me up one day and they said, we're remanding you into the hands of the January 6th Committee. | ||
| So that means, of course, I had problems with the January 6th Committee. | ||
| I had to be deposed by them twice. | ||
| But I did not testify to anything substantive because it's all privileged. | ||
| And then also the Senate Judiciary Committee came after me and put out an entire report attacking me. | ||
| And then under seal for quite a while until July of 2022, the DC bar started coming after me. | ||
| And they sent me a subpoena to give them the same documents that I had refused to give the January 6th committee. | ||
| So I told them, you don't have to take consistent legal positions. | ||
| These are privileged documents. | ||
| You can't see them. | ||
| And they, you know, eventually took me up to the local court, the highest home rule court in D.C., which if you were viceroy, Mike, you would be in charge of that court. | ||
| I would demolish. | ||
| But that court actually ruled in my favor. | ||
| Well, never mind. | ||
| I'll keep them. | ||
| So they ruled that those documents did not have to be handed over because to do that violated my Fifth Amendment constitutional rights. | ||
| But the substantive disciplinary proceedings began against me in July of 2022, and the prior month, I had my problems with the Garland Justice Department because they raided my house in late June of 2022. | ||
| And the very next day, the January 6th committee had an entire hearing focused on attacking me. | ||
| So I have all these congressional committees, both in the House and the Senate. | ||
| I have the D.C. | ||
| Bar coming after me. | ||
| And then, you know, the real piece de resistance is the Funny Willis making me one of the 19 alleged Rico co-conspirators in Fulton County Georgia Superior Court and then if there there is another one to add on Jack Smith had named me as unindicted co-conspirator number four in his DC action against President Trump and | ||
| Although, after the Supreme Court's immunity decision on July 1st, Jack Smith issued a superseding indictment, which is the one that's now live, and he dropped me out of that one. | ||
| So, thank goodness for small progress. | ||
| How does the Supreme Court's presidential immunity decision affect all these other cases, including the D.C. | ||
| Bar case and Big Fanny's case down in Georgia? | ||
| Talk about that. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, I think it has a lot of impact. | ||
| Let's obviously start with the fact that Jack Smith thought he couldn't proceed on his prior indictment. | ||
| He had to drop it and generate a new one. | ||
| Now, he tried to salvage as much of it as possible. | ||
| And I think that Judge Chetkin is letting him you know, unfairly strike two blows in a row, | ||
| I called it the equivalent of he's playing white in a chess game. | ||
| He gets the first two moves, not just the first move. | ||
| He got to file the superseding indictment. | ||
| And now on Thursday, and everyone has to really watch for this, | ||
| he's gonna launch 180 page brief with various excerpts, it seems of privileged testimony in the, | ||
| before the grand jury and other materials. | ||
| He's gonna focus apparently on the issue of President Trump talking to Vice President Pence | ||
| on and around January 2nd and 3rd. | ||
| And I just don't see how he can try to thread the needle to get that superseding indictment through. | ||
| Let's just take the vice president's involvement. | ||
| If you're the president and you're talking to your number two, the vice president, it seems to me that that is executive We're going to see how Jack Smith and Judge Chuck can try to get around that. | ||
| Also, in his case that Bragg brought in New York, in Manhattan, we had testimony from Hope Hicks about an Oval Office meeting. | ||
| There's a principle in the immunity decision that says that, I call it the Trump v. U.S. | ||
| exclusionary rule, that if you're basically talking about internal consultations that happen within the executive branch, that's privileged. | ||
| It can't be introduced in court. | ||
| Yet evidence like that was introduced in court. | ||
| What Bragg is trying to say is that's harmless error. | ||
| But I don't buy that. | ||
| I think it inherently infected the trial. | ||
| I think that whole trial has to be pulled up root and branch. | ||
| At the very least, President Trump needs a new trial up there. | ||
| And I think it's worse than that, because almost certainly they presented Hope Hicks' testimony to the grand jury, which means the entire indictment is affected. | ||
| I really think it needs to be pulled out. | ||
| They need to start from square zero. | ||
| In terms of the indictment that Fannie Willis brought, I think it's the same problem. | ||
| There are, you know, indications there that there were discussions between me and other people inside the Justice Department, you know, with the President. | ||
| There are the whole issue of President Trump talking about You know, other electors about talking to his chief of staff, Mark Meadows. | ||
| These are all things that violate the Trump immunity decision. | ||
| The reason why it's not being adjudicated right now is because for most defendants, the case is currently frozen at the Superior Court, the trial court level. | ||
| Mike, it's on appeal from nine of us, me and President Trump being two of those. | ||
| arguing that the trial judge wrongfully refused to disqualify Fannie Willis from that prosecution. | ||
| That appeal is going to be argued in December. | ||
| Let's talk about that. | ||
| Let's talk about Big Fannie. | ||
| So Big Fannie Willis hired her dumb, unqualified boyfriend, Nathan Wade, She had a sexual relationship with this boyfriend, her employee, her special counsel. | ||
| She paid him, what, $700,000 in Fulton County funds, including federal COVID funds, and then she took illegal kickbacks from Nathan Wade. | ||
| She took illegal kickbacks in the form of these lavish trips around the world. | ||
| She went to Belize. | ||
| She went to the Caribbean. | ||
| She went to Napa. | ||
| She told us she's a gray goose girl. | ||
| And then she lied about it. | ||
| She lied about her relationship with the judge. | ||
| And the problem is, is that she has an illegal financial stake in this case because she took kickbacks from her boyfriend to whom she paid $700,000. | ||
| Now, these are all allegations, of course, but is that generally the substance of the recusal motion? | ||
| That's part of it, but it's not just that that creates a conflict of interest. | ||
| And the trial judge acknowledged that it created the appearance of a conflict of interest. | ||
| I think it's more than that. | ||
| And as my lawyer, who's the main one here, he has this phrase that I like, so I'll borrow it here, the magical cash balancing theory. | ||
| The way that she tries to defend herself and Nathan Wade try to defend themselves is by saying that, oh no, you know, actually there were no benefits flowing back in her direction from the fact that she was paying her boyfriend, you know, rates that I don't think would even be paid to him in the market. | ||
| Let alone, you know, in this kind of highly scrutinized area, and he certainly is experience level, he has prosecuted cases, doesn't compare to that of the other special prosecutors that she hired, it's far below that, is that they say that after everything he did, she basically paid him back in cash, because she liked to keep cash around the house, and that's what her dad taught her. | ||
| Yeah, her Black Panther father told her to keep cash around the house, and then she said that she used this cash to pay back Nathan Wade, they went Dutch. | ||
| Essentially, the problem is, is she doesn't explain how she replenished that cash. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, you know, there are no ATM receipts, there are no, you know, bank statements. | ||
| It's all just on the say-so of, well, that's what we, I had a practice of doing that, right? | ||
| So, okay, imagine, you know, there's the trip to Belize or Napa or whatever, you know, it's, let's say, The plane tickets and hotel expenses are like $2,500. | ||
| Like, okay, she just gets there to get off the plane and she's like, here, Nathan, here's an envelope with $2,500 in it. | ||
| We're square. | ||
| Everything we do is going to be kosher because of that. | ||
| And we also saw that she showed up at her daughter's arrest for driving without a license, with a suspended license, and who shows up but Nathan Wade, right? | ||
| I thought she said she wasn't, that Nathan wasn't her boyfriend anymore, no? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They got back together apparently. | ||
| Yeah, and there's not just the magical cash balancing theory, there's the magical when did our relationship stop theory, and it stopped just before the indictment apparently, but you know, I don't, I don't, I don't really buy that either. | ||
| I think that all these things are going to be tested. | ||
| And in addition to all these appearance issues, right, I want to make this point. | ||
| However, whether you have magical cash balancing or not, if someone gives you a gift, and I forget the threshold, was it $100, $150? | ||
| It's something relatively small. | ||
| And certainly her cruises and the Napa trip exceeded this, like vastly exceeded this. | ||
| You have to report it. | ||
| And her theory in response to that is like, oh, no, no, no, like that's kind of local county law, even though it's incorporated against her because she's a county official. | ||
| I'm a constitutional officer under the Georgia Constitution. | ||
| Therefore, these things don't bind me. | ||
| I don't I don't think that theory is going to hold water either. | ||
| And so one of the things we've been pressing is that this case is not just about the conflict of interest or the appearance of the conflict of interest. | ||
| It's about the fact that she straight up violated these disclosure laws. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| She's bringing charges against the President of the United States and Department of Justice officials like yourself, but she says that she's above the law down in Georgia. | ||
| It's just, it's very, very rich. | ||
| But I would say this. | ||
| I think that, I would say that, I just don't know, Jeff. | ||
| I go back and forth. | ||
| Is $700,000 worth it to Nathan Waite? | ||
| I mean, if you have to, If you have to be Fannie Willis' boyfriend for $700,000, I just, I don't know who's getting, I don't know who's getting the worst deal there. | ||
| But anyway, let's, let's turn to the Justice Department. | ||
| You've talked about all these problems, how the Justice Department, the Biden-Harris Justice Department has been politicized and weaponized against Trump, his top aides, his lawyers, their supporters on January 6th. | ||
| You see these Democrat prosecutors and these Democrat hellholes like New York State with the AG, New York City with Alvin Bragg, Tish James, the AG, Fannie Willis down in Fulton County, Georgia, Chris May or whatever the hell her name is, the Arizona AG. | ||
| This is obviously a coordinated campaign, political lawfare, election interference | ||
| against President Trump. | ||
| What needs to happen in a Trump 47 Justice Department to end this lawfare, to end this election interference, | ||
| and make sure this never happens again? | ||
| So I think two things, Mike. | ||
| First is that we have to look at these special counsel regulations. | ||
| The special counsel regulations were put in in the Clinton administration after Congress specifically let the independent counsel statute lapse. | ||
| So they let it sunset deliberately. | ||
| You would think that an administration that saw a statute that was very controversial like that, right, that Uh, you know, bit both Republicans and Democrats, but I think was a very serious problem under the separation of powers as Justice Scalia's dissent in Marston v Olson explains, and I know you you well know. | ||
| That after that statute expired, you'd think you would say to yourself, okay, like Congress doesn't want this kind of a regime. | ||
| We're going to stop. | ||
| No, but that's not what happened under President Clinton and Janet Reno. | ||
| They decided they were going to try to replicate something very much like the statute under regulations. | ||
| And they put them out on the theory that they could just issue these regulations right away because it was an emergency that the independent counsel statute didn't exist anymore, which, you know, to my mind makes no sense. | ||
| It didn't exist because Congress didn't want it to exist. | ||
| So these regulations, which were written, as is now widely known, by Neil Katyal, who's a constant figure among the journo lawfare types that I've tried to coin that term and popularize it. | ||
| He appears on MSNBC a lot. | ||
| He wrote these regulations, and we've been living under them ever since. | ||
| I think the constitutionality and the statutory legality of those regulations needs to be revisited. | ||
| And we just need to get back to our separation of power system. | ||
| It is the President, Mike, who is the Chief of the Article Two branch. | ||
| He is not just the Commander in Chief, he is the Chief Magistrate. | ||
| And, you know, and I'll strike this out in controversial terms, he is also the Chief Prosecutor of the United States. | ||
| It's not some, you know, disembodied career bureaucracy inside the Justice Department. | ||
| Whatever post-Watergate norms say, that was Merrick Garland's big speech a couple weeks back in the Great Hall of Justice to the U.S. | ||
| Attorneys, we can't abandon these Watergate norms. | ||
| And just over the weekend, the New York Times put out an article and the article argued that Great discussion, Jeff Clark. | ||
| Unfortunately, we're out of time. | ||
| We will have you back on The War Room. | ||
| I want to tell The War Room posse, this is really important. | ||
| Jeff Clark, unfortunately, we're out of time. We will have you back on The War Room. I want to tell | ||
| The War Room posse, this is really important. Jeff Clark has been a warrior for the Constitution and | ||
| He is a soldier on the battlefield. | ||
| He's racked up tremendous legal fees, and we should help him. | ||
| Go to GiveSendGo.com slash Jeff Clark. | ||
| GiveSendGo.com slash Jeff Clark, and please help him. | ||
| And thank you for joining us for another episode of The War Room. | ||
| I am Mike Davis, the viceroy. | ||
| The next man up, standing in for Stephen K. Bannon, who is in the federal clink right now. | ||
| We need to make sure we vote and vote as early as possible because this election, everything | ||
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